Russia

Honor beatings are not a term usually associated with Internet videos. But the genre continues to creep onto the web with clips purportedly showing Kyrgyz migrant women in Russia being beaten by their male compatriots for allegedly shaming their nation.

By Charles Recknagel

The latest video, which first appeared on December 16 on the Russian-language Bilayv website and has since been posted on YouTube, makes for disturbing viewing.

Filmed by the attackers themselves, it apparently shows a young Kyrgyz woman cowering on the platform of an empty suburban train station in an unidentified Russian city and being kicked repeatedly in the back, stomach, and chest by two unseen men.

The sound accompanying the video is a string of curses and profanity in which the men accuse her of having sexual relations with non-Kyrgyz men, specifically Uzbeks and Tajiks.

Russian authorities say they are almost certain that one of the suicide bombers who attacked the Moscow Metro on Monday was a 17-year-old girl from Dagestan. The girl, Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, is believed to be the widow of a senior Caucasus militant killed by Russian security forces late last year. Dagestan, like nearby Chechnya, is struggling to quell militant violence. The morning rush-hour bombings killed 40 people and injured more than 80, most of whom are still in hospital. Update to Russia: Female suicide bombers kill dozens on Moscow subway

Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on the Moscow subway during the morning rush hour today, killing at least 35 people and injuring 51, Russian officials said. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, told reporters the suicide bombers were believed to have set off their explosives as trains approached Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro stations. "The first data that the FSB [Federal Security Service] has given us is that there were two female suicide bombers," he told reporters at Park Kultury.

In 2005, an ostensibly marginal show of conceptual art installations called Caution, Religion! in the Sakharov Centre for Human Rights led to charges of, "inciting religious hatred and offending the feelings of religious believers."

Most Central Asians maintain a largely secular worldview but among those searching for a new ethnic or national identity, there is renewed interest in religious ideas. Radical Islamic political ideas have also arrived from elsewhere in the Muslim world.